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Monday, 20 August 2012

I’ve had a busy couple of weeks, so there may be a few posts over the next week or so as I catch up with my blog.First up is Will Self’s Booker longlisted
novel, Umbrella.I haven’t had a chance
to read this and I suspect it will be very much an outsider for the prize, but
Self is always an interesting writer if an uncompromising one.I have had the pleasure of meeting him on
more than one occasion, and once won a signed book which he offered as a prize
(a story for another day).He likes to
parade his extensive vocabulary and loves walking and cycling (on his Brompton fold
up bike).Indeed, I recall him
describing how he rode on one Brompton while carrying a second in a bag over
his shoulder, something which he described as “bike on bike action”.

Umbrella has a medical theme – encepahalitis letharigica and
the use of L-dopa , and medical matters are something in which Self is interested (and the reason I won
the book from him). For years he injected heroin and also took cocaine and amphetamines. He
went to Oxford to read PPE, graduating with a third after spending much
of his spare time "hanging out" with schizophrenic outpatients from a
local hospital. There was a brief period of cold turkey in the 1980s but
he continued to use until a spectacular fall from grace in 1997 when he
was found snorting heroin on John Major's jet while covering the
election campaign for the Guardian. He now suffers from polycythaemia rubra vera, an uncommon and potentially serious blood disorder.

Like many of his
books, Umbrella is unlikely to be an easy read.Let me quote from the Guardian review – “400
pages of unbroken stream-of-consciousness dotted across three time frames,
leaping jaggedly between four points of view, and with barely a paragraph
break, let alone a chapter heading.”You
have been warned. The cover also looks very unattractive.

"Recently having abandoned his RD Laing-influenced experiment in running a
therapeutic community - the so-called Concept House in Willesden -
maverick psychiatrist Zack Busner arrives at Friern Hospital, a vast
Victorian mental asylum in North London, under a professional and a
marital cloud. He has every intention of avoiding controversy, but then
he encounters Audrey Dearth, a working-class girl from Fulham born in
1890 who has been immured in Friern for decades.

A socialist, a
feminist and a munitions worker at the Woolwich Arsenal, Audrey fell
victim to the encephalitis lethargica sleeping sickness epidemic at the
end of the First World War and, like one of the subjects in Oliver
Sacks' Awakenings, has been in a coma ever since. Realising that
Audrey is just one of a number of post-encephalitics scattered
throughout the asylum, Busner becomes involved in an attempt to bring
them back to life - with wholly unforeseen consequences.

Is
Audrey's diseased brain in its nightmarish compulsion a microcosm of the
technological revolutions of the twentieth century? And if Audrey is
ill at all - perhaps her illness is only modernity itself? And what of
Audrey's two brothers, Stanley and Albert: at the time she fell ill,
Stanley was missing presumed dead on the Western Front, while Albert was
in charge of the Arsenal itself, a coming man in the Imperial Civil
Service. Now, fifty years later, when Audrey awakes from her
pathological swoon, which of the two is it who remains alive?

Radical in its conception, uncompromising in its style, Umbrella is Will Self's most extravagant and imaginative exercise in speculative fiction to date."